Editorial: What's the point of keeping Gitmo open any longer?

Wednesday

Apr 27, 2011 at 12:01 AMApr 27, 2011 at 5:51 AM

From the beginning, something didn't feel quite right about the prisoner camp at Guantanamo. With the release of new information from Wikileaks provided by another source to the New York Times and some other publications, that feeling just got an exclamation point.

From the beginning, something didn't feel quite right about the prisoner camp at Guantanamo. With the release of new information from Wikileaks provided by another source to the New York Times and some other publications, that feeling just got an exclamation point.

The camp, on the island of Cuba, still holds 172 men, most labeled "high risk." What's disturbing about these latest revelations is not that America continues to imprison people perceived as a terrorist threat, but how we have gone about making those determinations, without trial or other resolution.

Wikileaks gained access to documents produced by military intelligence during the Bush administration, and what they largely show are detainees labeled irredeemable on the most questionable of evidence - on testimony from the mentally ill, for instance, or from other prisoners under duress such as torture. One, Abu Zubaydah, provided information while being waterboarded that was instrumental in the capture/confinement of some 100 others; indications now are that most of that information is no longer considered reliable by U.S. authorities.

Meanwhile, the Times reports that there seems to have been a bias regarding country of origin, with Saudis being sent home and Yemenis forced to stay. Some situations border on the impossible to believe out of anything but a banana republic: Mohammed Nasim of Afghanistan ended up at Gitmo in 2003 because he was believed to be a Taliban military commander; almost a year later it was determined "the detainee is a poor farmer and his arrest was due to mistaken identity."

Whoops.

It gets worse. Possessing certain types of "pocket litter" apparently proved a Gitmo-worthy offense, like the kind of watch some wore - in this case a Casio F91W, reportedly a favorite of terrorists but otherwise widely available around the world. A Yemeni prisoner was viewed with suspicion because of his pocket calculator, which conceivably could "be used for indirect fire calculations." A bus ticket to Kabul did not win any apologists. A Sudanese cameraman working for al-Jazeera was held for six years of interrogation about the Arab TV network's "newsgathering operations."

While there was little communication about the "enhanced interrogation techniques" employed, there was a reference to Mohammed Qahtani, a Saudi believed to be the 20th hijacker on 9-11-01: "Mr. Qahtani was leashed like a dog, sexually humilitated and forced to urinate on himself." Five prisoners committed suicide; another two dozen tried. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has targeted 47 it considers too dangerous for release, while acknowledging they lack the evidence to go to military tribunal. Federal judges have ruled in some 60 cases that Uncle Sam's information was too flimsy to hold these prisoners.

None of this necessarily means most of the above are innocent. By October 2010, it was determined that of the 598 released from Gitmo to that date, 150, or 25 percent, were "confirmed" or "suspected" of having engaged in later terrorist activity, the Times went on to report. Some very bad people have been and continue to be locked up there. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, may very well be the unrepentant mass murderer for whom no punishment is too harsh.

To date we have been of mixed emotions regarding Gitmo. If we were going to fight a war, then we needed someplace to keep the captured, and our existing base there was as good a location as any. That does not mean we ever believed it should be exploited as a place - outside the U.S. - to skirt national law or the Geneva Conventions. It may well have been that, and shame on us. We were led to believe conditions changed for the better following the U.S. Supreme Court's Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling in 2006. In part that's why we never endorsed Barack Obama's plans for closure there or the "Gitmo North" proposal to relocate its prisoners to Illinois.

But this is troubling. The better-wrong-than-sorry attitude that seems to have been prevalent during the Bush administration and to have carried over to the Obama White House is not becoming of a nation that pretends to hold dear the principles of freedom, fairness and fundamental human rights. If some of these guys didn't go in as enemies of the U.S., some may have come out that way. Does that make Gitmo a greater threat to national security than not? If Abu Ghraib undermined America's moral authority in the world, has Gitmo been any less of a black eye? How do we lecture China about its human rights record so long as Gitmo remains open? Do as we say, not as we do?

Wholly apart from the message it sends around the world, arguably its existence is corrosive from within, suggesting that we have been living a lie all these years, that America is not what we tell our children it is. Talk about your "mistaken identities."

While there is an element of damned if you do, damned if you don't, we have to believe the likes of a Khalid Shaikh Mohammed can be dealt with elsewhere without compromising America's safety. Gitmo has not accepted new prisoners since 2007. So what's the point of keeping it open any longer? We are better than this.

Peoria, Ill., Journal Star

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